It was produced in the UK and available in some other countries including Finland, Ireland, France, Spain, Denmark, Australia, Hellas and New Zealand.

Heavy weapons operate in special ways, such as being able to hit all units in a horizontal line, or attacking multiple targets.

Each of the chapters are identical, although the equipment cards for the Blood Angels are specialised in close combat, and the Imperial Fists in use of ranged heavy weapons.

The marine players have the advantage of heavy weapons, special equipment and high armour point values due to their power armour, while the alien player has the advantage of large numbers of pieces and random "Alien Event" cards which may be detrimental to his opponents.

Due to the country's stricter censorship laws (see Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons), the translation tones down most of the violent game elements: The aliens are "chaos robots", not living creatures.

The alien player gains extra heavy dreadnoughts, which are extremely powerful and capable of wiping out an entire squad.

The premise of the game is that a number of Space Marine scout squads are boarding a Tyranid ship in order to sabotage its delicate internal "organs".

The game is superficially similar to Space Hulk in that it uses 28 mm plastic Citadel Miniatures as play pieces, uses modular board pieces to represent the innards of the Hive ship, and has one player controlling the Marines while the other controls waves of Tyranids, but has no greater relationship to Space Crusade than any other game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Without the license from Milton Bradley, many of the components of Advanced Space Crusade were released in 1993's Tyranid Attack, a substantially different game.

It was available on Atari ST, IBM PC (MS-DOS), Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad and later received an expansion, The Voyage Beyond.